Hindutva’s red carpet to US tech is an own goal

US Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau recently said the quiet part out loud, stating that the US will not let India develop like China.

Landau’s remarks are honest about what the USA sees India as: a periphery country, needed to extract profits from by exploiting its low wages, decimating its environment, and plundering its resources.

This is similar to how Britain, in 1947, used the sterling balances negotiations to restrict India’s industrial development.

Though Britain owed India over £1 billion from World War II, Whitehall froze these funds. Britain leveraged “informational asymmetries while Indian sovereignties were in flux,” which ensured India could not use its own savings for industrialisation while keeping the country formally independent.

India’s Hindutva government, a global far-right project (along with US tech companies), reflects this US strategy.

China, with its massive state planning, has not allowed Google and other American companies to serve as virtual town halls or squares the way they do elsewhere, including in the UK. UK elites like Rishi Sunak, Peter Mandelson, and Tony Blair are deeply embedded with US tech, too. For example, Starmer’s adviser held 16 undisclosed meetings with top US tech bosses.

Google AI data centre — a calamity for locals

An example of Hindutva’s red carpet to US tech, helping super-profits for US monopolies and creating a new dependent relationship with the Global South, is Google’s AI data centre in the sleepy town of Visakhapatnam. Google, which is working on the project with Indian cronies — Bharti Airtel and Adani Group,

The hub is India’s first facility built for a US tech giant to train large-scale AI models. It will sprawl across 600 acres and, at full tilt, consume as much electricity as six million Indians.

According to the Polis Project:

In India, data centres are being granted uninterrupted power and water even as nearby poor communities struggle for basic access, and Dalit families in places like Mumbai and Visakhapatnam are reporting eviction pressure, land acquisition, and dispossession tied to this buildout.

Trump’s racist remarks on India

Hindutva’s obsequiousness to US firms, despite Trump recently calling India a “hellhole,” is because of the material interests of its elites. Just like the UK elites, the Indian elites have sold their souls to greed.

Professor Radhika Desai explains that elites in BRICS countries, including India, are too invested in the dollar system. They park their money there as their “treasure island,” which slows down dedollarisation and deepens their dependent relationship with US capital.

India recently welcomed Marco Rubio, who is Landau’s boss, and promised to buy $500 billion in American goods. Again, capitulating to US interests while India faces a huge crash in the rupee due to Trump’s own choice of war on Iran.

It could be that Rubio is prone to exaggerations like his boss, Trump, though, at least that is what Professor Ashok Swain quipped.

Indians don’t have money to buy gold, don’t have money for foreign travels, no gas, no petrol, Rupee is falling against dollar every day, Marco Rubio still thinks, Modi will buy $500 billion of US goods! https://t.co/w19HY94Akp

— Ashok Swain (@ashoswai) May 23, 2026

People’s Dispatch also questioned the nature of Rubio’s visit.

They said:

The political opposition in India has also found Modi’s government’s approach to the US problematic, often describing it as aimless and bordering on capitulation. They have questioned the failure of the state to defy US dictates of not buying oil from Russia or Iran, which is relatively cheaper and easier to transport than oil bought from the US.

Israel as the ‘Fatherland’

US-backed Israel had few nicer things to say about India. In a recent interview, Netanyahu said that in India, the love for Israel was “crazy.”

Netanyahu:

I’ll say this: we face delegitimization in much of the world — but not in India.

In India, there is an absolutely crazy love for Israel, truly crazy.

I think I have more followers from India than from anywhere else. pic.twitter.com/FRIo2cdVb3

Advertisement

— Clash Report (@clashreport) May 28, 2026

Again, Israel — which views itself as a part of the Global North — does not view India as an equal. Netanyahu’s appreciation lies in the fact that Israel wants access to cheap labour in India.

Israel’s Brigadier General Erez Winner, in an honest moment, as Landau said, said that India’s population was a ready-made production line for Israeli weapons. He guffawed after making this statement.

Modi infamously called Israel the “Fatherland” in his trip to the country just before it started bombing Iran with the USA.

The consequences of this war of aggression against Iran, a supplier of oil to India, are the fertilizer and food shortages India is currently facing.

India’s Frontline said that Modi calling Israel the Fatherland to India’s Motherland would go down in “history as the moment when India abandoned ethical diplomacy for performative mysticism in order to signal support to all anti-Muslim formations.”

The US-Israel tech alliance can be viewed as two core states functioning as a single war-tech apparatus — whereas India remains a peripheral host, forced to roll out the red carpet for US monopolies while its own people are dispossessed.

For example, US tech has backed Israel’s AI-powered genocide of Palestinians through Project Nimbus — a $1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing services for the Israeli government and defence establishment by Google and Amazon.

Michael Kwet of  Yale Law School said it well:

Big Tech corporations are modern-day East India companies; they are an extension of American imperial power. They colonise the global digital economy and reinforce the divide between the North and the South.

Landau was right. US tech firms have no interest in a developed India. They need cheap labour, plundered resources, and captive markets, not a rival.

Better to take the words of Landau, Trump, and Erez Winner at face value, of what they see as India’s role in the global economy.

Featured image via Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

By Nandita Lal

Source link